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Court Sentencing Patterns for Environmental Crimes: Is There a “Green” Gap in Punishment?

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Abstract

Objectives

This study examines sentencing patterns for environmental crimes and tests the assumption that “green” offenders receive more lenient treatment from criminal courts than non-environmental offenders.

Methods

We present two sets of analyses. First, we present an empirical portrait of environmental felony offenses convicted in a single state (Florida) over a fifteen-year period and the resulting criminal sanctions. Second, we use a precision matching analysis to assess whether environmental offenders receive more lenient treatment when compared to non-environmental offenders with the same characteristics and offense severity scores.

Results

Findings indicate that an overall small percentage of felony convictions in state courts stem from environmental crimes. We also find that punishments for environmental crimes are more lenient than sanctions assigned to comparable non-environmental offenses when the environmental crime is ecological, but that punishments are sometimes harsher when the environmental crime involves animals.

Conclusions

The findings provide general support for the argument that courts and other formal institutions of social control treat environmental crimes more leniently than non-environmental crimes. This paper also raises important questions about citizen and state actors’ perceptions of crimes against the environment and, more generally, about the ways in which theories of court sentencing behaviors apply to environmental crime sanctioning decisions.

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Notes

  1. These data did not contain any flag indicating the environmental cases. Instead, the data identified the specific statute violation for each sentencing event. We investigated a list of all statute violations recorded in the dataset over this period of time and identified any violations associated with ecological, animal, or other environmental harm.

  2. Including the total sentencing score as an additional matching variable would be redundant and result in an identical matched sample because we already include each component (e.g., prior record measures, offense severity) of the score separately in the matching algorithm.

  3. We conducted a series of ancillary analyses that included judicial circuit as a matching variable. Judicial circuit may be particularly important as a “local” control (see Heckman, et al. 1997; Cook et al. 2008); that is, a control for potential variation across judicial circuits in judge and prosecutor treatment of environmental and non-environmental offenders. However, matching within judicial circuits is restrictive and caused a reduction in our matched sample from 112,934 cases for ecological crimes to 20,310, and from 193,344 cases for wildlife crimes to 26,726. Notably, however, the results of these ancillary analyses were substantively the same for these more restrictive analyses (i.e., judicial circuit included as a matching variable) as those reported in the paper. In particular, we found similar “gaps” in sentencing outcomes between environmental and non-environmental offenders. These results are available upon request from the first author.

  4. We also conducted a series of robustness checks. First, we ran ancillary analyses where we matched and analyzed only the most common offense types under ecological (dumping and littering, over 500 lb) and wildlife/animal crimes (animal cruelty). Results were substantively the same as those shown in the analyses. We also conducted an analysis focused only on non-animal cruelty wildlife/animal crimes. Results were substantively the same except there was no longer a statistically significant increased likelihood of incarceration for wildlife and animal crimes. This suggests that the increased likelihood of incarceration is largely driven by the animal cruelty charges, which constitute the vast bulk of offenses within that category.

  5. One of the anonymous reviewers observed that the prevalence of drug crimes among the most frequently matched non-environmental crime types may be reflective of the Florida criminal punishment code treating crimes with indirect victimizations similarly. This is quite plausible and raises additional questions about why judges and prosecutors would treat ecological offenses leniently. In addition, the reviewer raised the point that if courts move to reduce prison sentences for drug offenders, the disparity between environmental and non-environmental offenses may change over time. We concur and would underscore the need for research that considers how changes in sentencing trends over time impact environmental crimes, if at all.

  6. We also explored these analyses further by testing differences in coefficients based on multinomial logistic regression analyses. Substantive results were similar to what is shown in “Appendix 2”.

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Acknowledgments

We very much appreciate the thoughtful comments and suggestions of Robert Apel as well as the anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for providing the data for this study. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of FDC or FDLE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Joshua C. Cochran

  2. Department of Criminology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Michael J. Lynch

  3. Department of Criminology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Elisa L. Toman

  4. Department of Mental Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Ryan T. Shields

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  1. Joshua C. Cochran
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  2. Michael J. Lynch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joshua C. Cochran.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 6 Sanction outcomes for ecological versus wildlife and animal crimes, pre- and post-matching
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Appendix 2

Table 7 Logistic regression of matching variables on prison sentence using matched green and non-green crime samples (prison = 1, non-prison = 0)
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Cochran, J.C., Lynch, M.J., Toman, E.L. et al. Court Sentencing Patterns for Environmental Crimes: Is There a “Green” Gap in Punishment?. J Quant Criminol 34, 37–66 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-016-9322-9

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